As many of you are aware, some users abuse Codeforces' virtual participation feature in order to submit prewritten solutions immediately when the contest starts so as to appear at the top of the contest leaderboards. A few examples are here, here, and here.
Of course, preventing cheating by virtual participants is rather difficult, especially because while these three are relatively obvious cases, other forms of dishonest behavior are just as plausible but are harder to detect. For example, someone who looked at the comments on a round's announcement before participating virtually and thus learned that a particularly valuable problem was relatively easy to solve would have an unfair advantage (as they would be able to earn more points by knowing to attempt this problem early into the contest), but one that would be rather difficult to detect.
Luckily, all Codeforces scoreboards include a checkbox towards the top-right of the page through which users can select whether to include unofficial scores in the rankings. This works great for rounds rated for all users (i.e. combined Div 1/Div 2 Rounds and rounds with separate contests for the two divisions). However, for rounds run only for Division 2 or Division 3, we run into a problem. There is no way to let the standings include participants who participated in the actual contest but who were over the rating cap, but not virtual participants from after the contest. I personally enjoy participating in these rounds to compete with the other unofficial contestants, to practice quick problem-solving, and to solve the harder problems, which are often interesting and challenging even though they're designed for a lower rating cap. Therefore, it's somewhat frustrating that it's difficult to access the standings as they were at the end of the contest (i.e. including only live participants) a while later.
It turns out that there's an easy solution already implemented. On Educational Round scoreboards, an option at the top-left allows users to select whether to view only Division 2 users or to show users from both divisions (separately from the option to show or hide virtual participants). I propose that Codeforces extend this feature to all rounds rated only for Division 2 or for Division 3. In other words, Div. 2 only and Div. 3 only rounds would have the same option to show or hide participants above the contest's rating cap independent of whether virtual participants are hidden.
Please feel free to share your thoughts below. While this is a relatively small problem, it does impact a large number of users: for example, 1557 competitors above the 1600 rating cap registered for the last Division 3 round alone. Moreover, I'm optimistic that this wouldn't be overly difficult to fix, as the necessary infrastructure already exists and is in active use. Implementing this proposal would simply be a matter of extending it to more rounds.
